What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? To be honest, we don't know. We're still trying to figure out what folding protein does, if anything. We really didn't think it through. However, we've gone to so much trouble making the website, setting up all the fancy graphs, hosting parties for our public image to stop doing it now. At least if we don't cure anything we would have had some fun right?

Moreover, you're not going to use that tiny bit of processor power that we take from you, so why don't you just donate it to us? Although sometimes your processor power isn't any good - sometimes proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold") and there can be serious consequences, like me losing all of my music data on my hard drive. This has happened 3 times in the last week. Do not sign up unless you have a top of the range computer.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals. And the closer we are to our goals, the better we'll be able to see what they are.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

What have we done so far? Well, we haven't actually done anything. We just thought of a great way to fold protein; getting you to do it for us. You using your computers to fold for us has many advantages. One, it's cheaper, and two we've got other things to do with our computer power.

Want to learn more? If we find out anything about it, we'll inform you. Until then keep that piece of software running and build up your WUs and points. Until then, we'll be playing our significantly slower game of WoW - training to get that elusive Level 60.

Since October 1, 2000, over 1,000,000 CPUs throughout the world have participated in Folding@Home. Why? Not because they want to help with anything, they just want to be on a long list of users with lots of points. Actually, most of them just think it's a social networking site.